HuffPost Arts' Haiku Reviews is a weekly feature where invited critics review exhibitions and performances in short form. Some will be in the traditional Haiku form of 5x7x5 syllables, others might be a sonnet or a string of words together. This week Rodney Punt, Peter Frank and George Heymont give quick takes on performing and visual art. Is there a show or performance that you think people should know about? Write a Haiku with a link and shine a light on something you think is noteworthy too.

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Haiku Reviews: February 17, 2011

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PHOTO CREDIT: JOSH LEVINE, My Menagerie: Bi Cranial Rhinocerotidae, 2010, cast bronze, 2½ x 2¾ x 5½ inches
WHAT: Josh Levine
Koplin Del Rio
6031 Washington Blvd., Culver City, CA
Through February 26
HAIKU REVIEW: Josh Levine's sculptures seem like taxidermied examples of fauna found on a planet imagined by Dr. Seuss. They riff grotesquely on the animals we know, adding eyes and legs and horns to perfectly innocent (if rather cartoony) specimens, but the mutations come out even more endearing than the originals - perhaps because Levine is not averse to boosting them with a jolt of anthropomorphism. All that aisde, however, because the centerpiece of this show is the array of little bronzes Levine has created in small editions, bronzes of sweetly ridiculous hybrids between gorillas and kangaroos, rhinos and walruses, penguins and bears. Pop surrealism now has its own animalier. - Peter Frank

PHOTO CREDIT: Marissa Keltie and Theo Black in Central Works production, A Man's Home...an ode to Kafka's Castle, playing at the Berkeley City Club thru March 12. Photo: Jay Yamada
WHAT: "A Man's Home ... An Ode to Kafka's Castle"
Central Work
Berkeley City Club, 2315 Durant Avenue, Berkeley, California 94704
Through March 13
HAIKU REVIEW: Central Works scores another hit with its brilliant world premiere of A Man's Home...An Ode to Kafka's Castle. Written and directed by Aaron Henne, this is 90 minutes of what may seem like utter nonsense but turns out to be a riveting adventure in the theatre of movement. Theo Black delivers an astonishingly gripping performance as Kafka's land surveyor, with solid support from Sylvia Kratins, Marissa Keltie, and Joe Jordan. If you want theatre that pushes the creative envelope to the limits, don't miss this show. - George Heymont

PHOTO CREDIT: Photo Credit: Photo and work "Calculated Risk" by Michael Westmoreland
WHAT: "Scenes from a Gallery"
All Saints' Episcopal
Beverly Hills, CA
January 23, 2011
HAIKU REVIEW: Churches today showcase secular spirituality in the arts. Chamber Music at All Saints' in Beverly Hills (link) is part of this movement, its organist-choir director Craig Phillips a composer-in-residence. Two West Coast premieres, Sojourn for Organ & Winds (2009, with oboe, Bb clarinet, F horn, bassoon) and Scenes from a Gallery (2008, organ, violin and flute) featured his traditional, lyrically gifted style. Scenes, inspired by Mussorgsky, comments on six contemporary artworks: the swirls of "First Chakra Light", thrusting wings of "Calculated Risk", isolation of "Lone Tree", birdcalls of a winged "Muse", geometric chord progressions of "Mathematical Equation for Grace", and abstractions of "Breaking Loose." Sojourn's single movement in four episodes has cinematic Handelian motifs, bucolic horn calls, swelling mountain vistas, and a village dance for organ - all atmospherics of Alet-Les-Bains, France. Inserted mid-way, Francis Poulenc's Sextet (for winds) brought the sassy joie-de-vivre racket of naughty French Pigalle to a stone-sober English church. - Rodney Punt

PHOTO CREDIT: "The Archaic Revival" installation view at Las Cienegas Projects
WHAT: "The Archaic Revival"
Las Cienegas Projects
2045 S. La Cienega Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
Through February 26
HAIKU REVIEW: "The Archaic Revival" is the title of Terence Mckenna's 1992 book proposing an Aquarian-age return to shamanism, alchemy, and pagan ritual (through, among other things, avant garde phenomena such as surrealism and jazz). Under this provocative rubric have been gathered some very strange, elaborate, weirdly visionary artworks. Curator Dani Tull has put his finger on a startling and reassuring tendency among his fellow southern California (and other) artists, a desire to reawaken mystery and fabulation through art and to stoke what Lawrence Ferlinghetti (or was it Gregory Corso?) heralded as a "rebirth of wonder." Some of the works - made by 26 artists in an exhausting variety of media - are wower than others, and lord knows plenty of stony dopiness abounds, but the self-conscious adolescent doodling that has consumed galleries over the past decade here gives way to some really adventurous picture- and object-making and, yes, story-telling and mythifying. Among the artists: Sarah Cromarty, Pentti Monkkonen, Amy Sarkisian, Anna Sew Hoy, Jim Shaw, Liz Craft, Francesca Gabbiani, Wendell Gladstone, Sandeep Mukherjee, Allison Schulnik, Mindy Shapero, Laurie Steelink, and Marnie Weber. - Peter Frank

PHOTO CREDIT: Pictured left to right: Caleb Draper as Ben and Bill Fahrner* as Mark in Stephen Sondheim's Marry Me A Little, a musical comedy with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; directed by John Fisher. A Theatre Rhinoceros Production at the Eureka Theatre. Photo by Kent Taylor.
WHAT: Marry Me A Little
Theatre Rhinoceros
Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson Street, San Francisco, California 94111
Through February 20
HAIKU REVIEW: John Fisher (whose career has been marked by great moments of wretched excess) has used his overly fertile imagination to smashing effect in restaging Marry Me A Little to be sung by two men. Always an astute observer of the gay culture in which he lives and thrives, Fisher has layered a myriad of nuances into the body language of each character, whether the moments involve dressing to go out on a date, reacting to someone else's promises of a rosy future, or one man noticing his boyfriend cruising a passerby while supposedly engaged in an intimate conversation in a restaurant or cafe, Fisher hits a home run with this production. Caleb Haven Draper and Bill Fahrner sing a roster of songs that were dropped from Stephen Sondheim musicals during their out-of-town tryouts. Having seen Yvonne DeCarlo's understated delivery of "Boy, Can That Boy Foxtrot!" during the 1971 Boston tryout of Follies, I can tell you that Fisher's highly sexualized staging of the song (including an athletically delivered under-the-bedcovers blowjob) is a helluva lot more fun! - George Heymont

PHOTO CREDIT: PAUL STOELTING, "Content Aware," installation, view Pepin Moore Gallery
WHAT: Paul Stoelting
Pepin Moore
933 Chung King Rd.
Los Angeles, CA
Through February 26
HAIKU REVIEW: Paul Stoelting's sculpture plays with ideas of good design - especially classic modernist design right out of the Bauhaus - without flouting them. Stoelting's not-quite-empty frames and not-quite-functional furniture, not to mention the various under-functional devices he creates that mediate between wall and floor, and between pathetic inutility and mysterious self-containment. Indeed, Stoelting's stuff works so well together, taking over whatever empty room it occupies with such authority, that you want him to design into the space rather than merely fill it with hints of things. For once, an artist should have done an installation and didn't. Or maybe Stoelting is cultivating this very underdone-ness, and what he's reaching for is a more metaphysical minimalism. - Peter Frank

PHOTO CREDIT: Warren David Keith plays Stu- Stu is talking to Ben about Eliza.
WHAT: What We're Up Against
Magic Theatre
Fort Mason Center, Building D, Third Floor, San Francisco, California 94123
Through March 6
HAIKU REVIEW: Theresa Rebeck's rude, crude, and hilariously funny play about sexism in the workplace receives a raucous world premiere from San Francisco's Magic Theatre. Sarah Nealis stars as Eliza, an aggressive female architect hired into an all-male firm because she's at least eight times as smart as any of the jock-type golden boys on staff who are far more interested in jockeying for positions of power than doing any architectural work of merit. Eliza's biggest obstacle is Stu (Warren David Keith), an aging alcoholic and highly misogynistic "good old boy," who is not about to give Eliza any meaningful work. Thanks to G. W. Mercier's sleekly miminalist set and Loretto Greco's beautifully paced direction, the
battle between the sexes enters a seething new chapter as the one male architect in the firm with any brains (Rod Gnapp) remains fixated on how to solve a problem with some pesky ducts in a shopping mall redesign. - George Heymont

PHOTO CREDIT: Mike Kelley
Kandor 10 A, 2010
Mixed media 11 x 16 x 12 feet overal (3.4 x 4.9 x 3.7 m)
KELLE 2010.0001
Gagosian Gallery
Photo: Frederik Nilsen
WHAT: Mike Kelley
Gagosian
456 N. Camden Drive
Beverly Hills, CA
Through February 19
HAIKU REVIEW: Mike Kelley's many-mansioned installation (well, pair of installations) seems a multi-media morass of space-age exotica, sort of a sci-fi fantasy a la Flash Gordon (or, given the erotic overtones, Flesh Gordon), until you re-consider the (collective) title, "Kandor." Any fanboy can tell you that Kandor is a city plopped in a bottle after being plucked off Krypton. Yes, that Krypton. Indeed, Kandor is the birthplace of Supergirl. Futuristic cityscapes and bell jars that look like they hooked up to whiskey stills thus proliferate among Kelley's stage sets and projections, suggesting at once a mad scientist's lair and the moral abandon of people cut off from their civilizations. There is something operatic in Kelley's over-the-topness, but also something super-spectacularly silly. (What, for instance, is a certain bewhiskered, white-suited gentleman doing amidst the hoopla? Is this Colonel Sanders' Kandor?) - Peter Frank

WHAT: "The Little Match Girl Passion"
Perilous Balance
Jacaranda Music
First Presbyterian
Santa Monica, CA
January 22, 2011
HAIKU REVIEW: Composer/Librettist David Lang's The Little Match Girl Passion (2007) is a winter's tale without a happy ending. Based on the H.C. Anderson tearjerker, a beggar girl is forced to sell matches in the snow, lighting them one by one in a losing battle to keep warm. The setting elevates the story to a universal secular passion, with music of pointillistic brightness and mesmerizing grace. Its cast of four singing narrators did double duty as eerie trance-inducers and light-as-a-feather percussionists. The music has traces of minimalism and chant; its utmost economy of motifs treads an inexorable path from the dread of a flickering heartbeat to a death in frozen stillness.
Concert also had other genre-bending works: Elliott Carter's spidery Sonata for flute, oboe, cello & harpsichord, Sofia Gubaidulina's oddly-registered pulsing sonics for organ in Light & Darkness, Joan Tower's big-boned Night Fields for string quartet, and Alfred Schnittke's goofy-glorious Sound & Resound for organ and trombone. For full season, see: http://jacarandamusic.org/ - Rodney Punt

PHOTO CREDIT: DAENA TITLE, Madonna of the Dolls, 2008, Oil on canvas, 42 x 42 inches
WHAT: Daena Title
Koplin Del Rio
6031 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA
Through February 26
Interview with Peter Frank, February 19, 3 pm
HAIKU REVIEW: Daena Title is a figurative painter whose favored figure may be inanimate but is more famous than most figures. Title's treatment of this un-living living doll has caused no little controversy among various blogospheric neo-anti-feminists, but jeez, can't a gal drown her Barbie dolls, and paint the process, in peace? If Title did this as a You Tube performance she'd doubtless catch less flak; what is it about painting, that antique, noble medium, that its subject matter has to be so august? Title is a skilled painter, sensitive to the rendition of water and cloth and flesh and plastic; her doll-drowning pictures aren't painstakingly naturalistic, but their close-up vantages and complex compositions do dramatize the act. - Peter Frank

PHOTO CREDIT: ETHAN SHOSHAN, A Start for Something Different, 2011, Enamel on cotton rag paper, 10 x 8 inches, Courtesy Commonwealth & Council and Gallery 3209
WHAT: Ethan Shoshan
Gallery 3209
3209 La Cienega Ave.
Culver City, CA
Through February 26
HAIKU REVIEW: Ethan Shoshan, a young artist from New York, imbues odd things with intensely personal meanings, not least his father's family Holocaust-related history. But that legacy is not an obsession for Shoshan so much as a jumping-off point, a marveling at little mysteries in the wake of huge calamities. The bulk of Shoshan's show is composed of abstractions painted with enamel on rag paper dotting the wall. The paint is dark almost to the point of invisibility, but then the light hits it and the rivulets and globules of paint light up like oil slicks in puddles with an iridescent, and almost fluorescent, glow. "He was the color of the moth once the dust is brushed off," Shoshan heard one relative describe another, and Shoshan has gone seeking for the poetry in such abjectness. - Peter Frank